Libby Trial Update

We’ve just been alerted that “The parties have been asked to meet in Court at 4:05 p.m. today Monday March 5 to review a note with questions that the Court has received from the jury.”

This is the third note that the jury has written asking for clarification of some kind — a punctiliousness that I feel bad for not finding more laudable. As I’ve written before, I think this jury’s desire to be thorough and decent will probably wind up edging their verdict toward innocent, if only because they are taking their duty to be convinced beyond “reasonable doubt” very seriously. That Libby would get off because his “peers” suffer from an excess of honesty is an irony that would make for comedy if it wasn’t so thuddingly familiar.

Like how, in other news, the judge in the case released a memo on Friday that seriously spanked the defense for “misleading” the court, hinting that Libby and/or Cheney would take the stand. Walton said that had he realized the two star witnesses would never testify, he may have made a different decision regarding what classified material was allowed in evidence. What, the intelligence was “cooked”? Shock, horror!

In three years, if the jurors start saying that they’d like to see Libby put on a “timetable” for going to prison, the parallels will be complete…